Meissner narrating the global financial crisis; urban imaginaries and the politics of myth (2017)

con-In so doing, my analysis will focus on“urban imaginaries” in GFC portrayals.Building on Marxian sociologist Henri Lefebvre’s theory of a social “produc-tion of space” Lefebvre 1974,

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be and do in and across specific locations, and what social, political andcultural forms and imaginations this makes possible or renders obsolete Aparticular focus is the vital contribution made by different forms of theimagination (social, cultural, popular) to the conception, experience andcritique of contemporary globalization Palgrave Studies in Globalization,Culture and Society is committed to addressing globalization across cul-tural contexts (western and non-western) through interdisciplinary, theo-retically driven scholarship that is empirically grounded in detailed casestudies and close analyses Within the scope outlined above, we invitejunior and senior scholars to submit proposals for monographs, editedvolumes and the Palgrave Pivot format Please contact the series editors formore information: b.j.dekloet@uva.nl / e.peeren@uva.nl

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Narrating the Global

Financial Crisis

Urban Imaginaries and the Politics of Myth

Department of Sociology

Lancaster University

Lancaster, United Kingdom

Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society

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Writing this book would have been impossible, and also much less sant, without the support of many, whom I wish to thank here TheAmsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) at the University ofAmsterdam generously provided the financial support for the first fouryears of this project, which allowed me to focus fully on the research andwriting, as well as to travel and“test” my ideas in different environments.The Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Lancaster University provided itssupport for thefinalization of this project and helped me to include some

plea-of the visual material that I discuss in this book as illustrations

Many scholars have helped me to develop, challenge and re-develop myideas for this book I would like to thank some of them, in particular, forsharing their interests and insights, as well as for helping me to bring mywriting into a publishable form More gratitude than I could express heregoes to Christoph Lindner, who encouraged this project from its verybeginning five years ago, and whose heartening enthusiasm, attentivefeedback, and thoughtful practical advice were crucial to every step of itsfurther development

I wish to thank Marieke de Goede, Jeroen de Kloet, Nicky Marsh,Esther Peeren, Patricia Pisters, and Gillian Rose for their careful readingand invaluable comments on my writing Esther Peeren and Jeroen deKloet I want to thank twice Their help and confidence allowed me to havethis book be part of the Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture andSociety series, which is a great opportunity I thank Joyce Goggin forpassing on to me her fascination with the critical study of finance andfinancial fiction, and for including me in every event related to these topics

v

I wish to thank Patricia Pisters and Greg de Cuir for encouraging me topublish myfirst research findings in NECSUS: European Journal of MediaStudies I also thank NECSUS for allowing me to reprint some of thatmaterial in this book I am grateful to Julia Ott and Joseph Heathcott forinviting and welcoming me at the New School for Social Research, which–apart from an interesting guest research experience– also provided a greatopportunity to get to know New York.

In terms of moral and intellectual support, I wish to thank all of themembers of ASCA for being such an energizing, inspiring and warm-hearted group! ASCA’s Ph.D community provided great support for,and distraction from, this project I am grateful for all the helpful, excitingand funny conversations at the office, during breaks and beyond From thePh.D community, I particularly wish to thank Judith Naeff and PedramDibazar, whom I consider a dream team, as well as Simon Ferdinand,Marie Beauchamps, Tim Yaczo, Tijmen Klous, Selçuk Balamir, LaraMazurski, Enis Dinç, Uzma Abid Ansari, Blandine Joret, Nur Ozgenalp,Niall Martin, Melle Kromhout and Irene Villaescusa Illán

My friends have been, and continue to be great in supporting me, but also

in making sure that I do not get“lost in my head” I cannot acknowledge all

of the different ways in which they manage to do so, but I wish to thanksome of them, in particular, for being there for me throughout the past fewyears Anna-Helena Klumpen, Dea van Lierop, and Diana Soto de Jesús, Ithank for being close during our first few years in Amsterdam, and forcontinuing to care and stay in touch in spite of our present distance.Marine Delgado, Clara Dutilleul, Marina Henao, Marika Tsombikos,Lorna Kirkpatrick and Jella Lorenz– my Radioweg family – I thank for afantastic time living together, for their care, their wit, and for makingAmsterdam home I thank Neli Dobreva for her longtime support and belief

in me, and for providing a home in Paris; Dana Rubin Macioti for being aninspirational thinker andfighter; Hania Raciborska for organizing energiz-ing travels around Europe; Elwira Lewandowska and Ritesh Kumar for

“adopting me” as an almost stranger at their place in New York – and forbeing the best (and also the most funny) impression I took home from thiscity I am also grateful to Julia Baldus, Francis Bendel, Lena Heuel, Carmela

La Marca, Alicja Malinowski, Jenny Neumann, Claudia Pinnhammer, AnitaProchnicki, Ilka Schlegel and Marie-Christine Ulmen, for staying in touchand making me feel as if I never left whenever I come back to Bonn.Finally, I wish to express much gratitude to my family– to my grand-parents Maria and Werner Krapohl, and Gertrud and Günther Meissner, as

well as to Walter, Heike, Patrick, Tobias Meissner and Margarete Siegberg–for believing in me even if it was not always clear what I was doing (maybe itstill isn’t) Most of all, I wish to thank my parents, Jeannine and BerndMeissner, for their trust and love, and for finding ways to be, move andcelebrate with me at every moment and despite any geographical distance.Last but not least, I thank Federico Savini, for sharing with me all theimportant (and also some of the less important) thoughts, ideas and feelings

of the last years, and for being able to turn even the more difficult momentsinto laughter

1 Introduction: Myths of Finance and the City 1

3 Setting the Scene: Financial Spaces and Architectures 41

4 Figuring Flows: Urban Transport Myths of Trading 83

5 Dwelling in Times of Financialization: Dreams, Ruins,

6 Specters of Finance and the Black Box City 173

7 Conclusion: Financialization, Spectral Absence

ix

Fig 3.1 Geometrical aesthetics in the opening credits of Wall Street:

Money Never Sleeps (2010) 53 Fig 3.2 High angle shot of the grid city in Inside Job (2010) 55 Fig 3.3 The financial gaze in Freefall (2009) 56 Fig 3.4 Estranged perspectives: trading screen re flections

in the windowpane of a London-based investment bank

Fig 3.5 Skyline index in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010) 61 Fig 3.6 Fictitious capital block skyscraper in The Big Short (2015) 63 Fig 3.7 Skyscraper-bomb imaginary Front cover of DER SPIEGEL

Fig 4.1 Subway specters: flashback to Louis Zabel’s suicide in Wall

Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010) 92 Fig 4.2 Photograph of Winnie as the underlying asset of Gekko

and Jacob ’s “subway deals” in Wall Street: Money Never

Fig 4.3 Sacri ficial suicide in Cosmopolis (2012) 130 Fig 5.1 Housing imaginary of wealth distribution in the U.S.A,

published in Vanity Fair (2011) Illustration by Stephen

Doyle Courtesy of Doyle Partners 135

xi

Fig 5.2 Foreclosure housing interior in Cleveland contre Wall Street

Fig 5.3 Rococo dreams David and Jackie Siegel in the opening

credits of The Queen of Versailles (2012) 143 Fig 5.4 Real vs “unreal” estate in The Queen of Versailles (2012) 148 Fig 5.5 The “new ruin” of Versailles Blending between actual and

envisioned state of the estate in The Queen of Versailles

Fig 5.6 Dwelling congestion and negligence in The Queen

of Versailles (2012) 163 Fig 5.7 “Dwelling back to the future”: Jasmine’s house viewing

with Hal in Blue Jasmine (2013) 166 Fig 6.1 High angle “black box” shot in Money and Speed: Inside

the Black Box (2011) 179 Fig 6.2 Spectral interurban streams in The Wall Street Code (2013) 181 Fig 6.3 “Strange overtones” in the global financial city, in Wall

Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010) 185 Fig 6.4 New Jersey data center “black box” from the car perspective

in Money and Speed: Inside the Black Box (2011) 188 Fig 6.5 New Jersey data center “black box” from the satellite

perspective in Money and Speed: Inside the Black Box (2011) 189 Fig 6.6 “Back to Work” People walking past Wall Street’s stock

exchange on September 29, 2008, photo by Justin Lane

Fig 6.7 Businessmen passing the classicist stone columns of London’s

Bank of England on September 30, 2008 “Stormy

Weather”, photo by Daniel Berehulak (2008, Getty) 205 Fig 6.8 “Financial news of today’s turbulent stock market is displayed

on a news ticker in Times Square May 6, 2010 in New York

City ”, photo by Daniel Barry (2010, Getty) 206 Fig 6.9 “FTSE 100 Financial boards on the Cromwell Road,

London ”, photo by Paul Grover (2011, Telegraph Media

Introduction: Myths of Finance and the City

In 2008, a series offinancial market events occurred that seemingly createdthe immediate urgency to communicate what is happening in global bankingand monetary systems to the public These events– which included worldwidestock market plunges, a widespread interbank liquidity freeze, bailouts andnationalizations of internationalfinancial institutions by national governmentsand the bankruptcy of investment bank Lehman Brothers – were directlytermed a“financial crisis” Regarding the severity of its worldwide economicimpacts, thisfinancial crisis was compared to the Great Depression, and it wasnamed the“2007–2008 Financial Crisis”, the “late 2000s Financial Crisis”,the“North Atlantic Financial Crisis” and the “Global Financial Crisis”.For the sake of simplicity, I will refer to these events as the GlobalFinancial Crisis (GFC), though I also wish to acknowledge that callingthese events “global”, “financial” and a “crisis” bears several proble-matic connotations, which are at the heart of the very dynamics of crisisdepiction that this book seeks to address Does the adjective “global”imply that the market events of 2008, whose causes and impacts reachfar beyond the year 2008, occurred simultaneously and in a similarfashion anywhere around the globe? Does the attribute “financial”refer to financial markets alone, or does it also comprise financialpractices that extend beyond the immediate sphere of professionalinvestment and trading? And what qualifies the events of 2008 as acrisis – in particular, given that the very concept of crisis may refer to asituation of choice between alternatives, to a state of revolution, to the

© The Author(s) 2017

M Meissner, Narrating the Global Financial Crisis,

Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society,

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-45411-5_1

1

end of an epoch, to a phase of transition, or to a recurring event that isimplicated in a certain system (Koselleck2006)?

Questions about the conceptual, narrative and aesthetic framings of temporary crisis depictions are at the center of this book, which examinesportrayals of the GFC in popularfilm, literature and journalistic photography

con-In so doing, my analysis will focus on“urban imaginaries” in GFC portrayals.Building on Marxian sociologist Henri Lefebvre’s theory of a social “produc-tion of space” (Lefebvre 1974), contemporary scholarship in thefields ofsociology, geography, anthropology,film, cultural and literary studies usesthe concept of urban imaginary to refer to the ways in which socio-culturallyconstructed images of urban form and experience shape individuals’ percep-tions of, attitudes to, and behavior in cities, as well as the interpretations ofurban settings and aesthetics in narrative and visual cultures

Infilmic, literary and photographic portrayals of the GFC, such urbanimaginaries are strikingly prevalent Particularly noteworthy is that similarimaginaries– such as skyline shots of Manhattan in the opening credits ofGFC films – recur in a vast amount of crisis narratives Oliver Stone’sfinancial crisis drama film Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is an example ofthis tendency With box office returns of about 134 million dollars, it isone of the most popular and lucrative crisisfilms The film features shotsthat bring into focus the city of New York, its architecture, infrastructures,

office and housing designs Similar shots can be found in a range of crisisfilms, whether fictional or documentary, such as Adam McKay’s The BigShort (2015), J.C Chandor’s Margin Call (2011), Curtis Hanson’s TooBig to Fail (2011), Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job (2010), Alex Gibney’sClient 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer (2010) and Michael Samuel’sThe Last Days of Lehman Brothers (2009)

These corporate and inner city imaginaries feature motifs of suburbansingle-family houses, urban abandonment and building ruins as a counter-part Suburban, ruin and abandonment imaginaries are particularly pre-valent in documentaries about the GFC-inflicted U.S foreclosure crisis,including Ramin Bahrani’s 99 Homes (2014), Patrick Lovell’s Forward 13:Waking up the American Dream (2014), the Al Jazeera Fault Linesdocumentary For Sale: The American Dream (Fault Lines 2012), HeidiEwing and Rachel Grady’s Detropia (2012), Raymond A Schillinger’sDreams for Sale: Lehigh Acres and the Florida Foreclosure Crisis (2010)and Jean-Stéphane Bron’s Cleveland contre Wall Street (2010)

And evenfinancial crisis novels, which – in contrast to film – are lessbound to drawing a detailed image of their plots’ settings, set cities at the

center of their respective crisis elaborations This is reflected in detaileddescriptions of urban settings, which often associatefinance with a certainurbanZeitgeist or mindset It is also reflected in novel titles, such as JohnLancaster’s Capital (2012) – which ambivalently refers both to financecapital and to the national-financial capital city of London – DouglasBrunt’s Ghosts of Manhattan (2012), Alex Preston’s This Bleeding City(2010) and Paul Auster’s Sunset Park (2010).

Repeated in various guises in multiple crisis portrayals– whether literary,filmic or photographic – the urban imaginaries of these texts and images arethus likely to be associated withfinance In this vein, they act as framingsthrough which both the GFC and contemporary finance in general areconceived The concept of framing in this context refers to “the words,images, phrases and presentation styles” that crisis portrayals use to com-municate the crisis event, which is how a branch of social sciences andcommunication studies apply the concept of framing as a tool of discourseanalysis (Druckman2001: 227) In cinema and theatre studies, this aspect ofcrisis depiction would correspond to the concept of mise-en-scène, under-stood as the setting, décor, light, sound and perspectival features of a givenscene, which convey information about the spatio-temporal context of thenarrative’s plot, a certain atmosphere and interpretative clues

Understood this way, the role of urban imaginaries in GFC portrayals isthat of active determining factors– of narrative-aesthetic features that, byshaping the ways in which the GFC is perceived and conceived, potentially

influence socio-political responses to this crisis, thus co-determining theways in which the crisis event unfolds However, the role of urban imagin-aries in GFC portrayals also extends these definitions of framing and mise-en-scène, because, in many GFC portrayals, urban imaginaries “produce”the crisis as an event I will argue that the GFC lacks many conventionalcharacteristics of narrative eventfulness, in particular that of a“change ofstate”, implying the clear “transition from one state (situation) to another”(Hühn 2009: 80; see also Chapter 6) Urban imaginaries in GFC por-trayals narratively and aesthetically produce the crisis as an event despite itslack of conventional eventfulness

Therefore, and despite the productive potential that the concepts offraming andmise-en-scène yield as analytical concepts, I will use the con-cept of myth as a lens through which to close read urban imaginaries inGFC portrayals This choice has two main motivations Thefirst motiva-tion is that, like urban imaginaries, the concept of myth is strikinglyprevalent in contemporary discourses on finance and economics Book

title, Mark A Martinez’ The Myth of the Free Market: The Role of the State in

a Capitalist Economy (2009) are examples of this tendency This raises thequestion of why economic practice today– finance in particular – is thought

of in terms of myth, and what the concept of myth means in contemporaryeconomic theory and critique, as well as in media culture

The second and more important reason to use myth as my mainconcept of analysis is that disciplines such as anthropology, semiology,psychology, sociology and cultural studies highlight the relationshipbetween myth, ideological communication and situations of crisis Theterm “crisis” in this context applies in a double sense Myth has been

defined as a form of expression that accrues from worldly crises, but alsofrom crises of representation Both conceptualizations of crisis are rele-vant with regard to the GFC

PORTRAYING FINANCE

InThe Philosophy of Money, Georg Simmel has argued that the basic ing principle of money is to abstract from concrete objects and contexts tomake them comparable in terms of exchange value: “[A]bandoning allquality of value, it [money] represents the pure quantum of value innumerical form” (Simmel2009 [1900]: 191; my translation) The ques-tion that arises from this is how the operations of thefinance economy can

work-be represented without taking recourse to numerical form? And, evenmore difficult to answer is the question of how the various “processes ofabstraction” (La Berge 2014: 97) that finance includes – from theexchange abstractions that money numerically represents, to the morecomplex abstractions offinancial instruments, such as credits and deriva-tives – can be portrayed In other words, how can financial processes beportrayed in non-abstract, non-numerical ways?

Throughout the history of the money economy, different attempts havebeen made to portrayfinance in various media The edited volumes Money:Lure, Lore, and Literature (1994) and Literature and Money (1993)provide exemplary overviews of the many ways in which money has beentreated in literature and language Both volumes start from the assumptionthat money and art/literature are oppositional While, in Money: Lure,Lore, and Literature, money and art are termed“irreconcilable opposites”(book cover), inMoney and Literature“mobilizations of the aesthetic (orthe textual)” are described as experimental “sites of resistance to economichegemony” (Purdy1993: 6)

However, even if the money economy and the arts are often deemedoppositional, critical theory also points to the interdependencies betweenboth InGenres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth andNineteenth Century Britain, Mary Poovey argues that, in the late seven-teenth andfirst three quarters of the eighteenth century, literary writing inBritain notably mediated the prospering credit economy of the time, inthat it“helped to make the system of credit and debt usable and the marketmodel of value familiar as well” (Poovey2008: 2) As a“genre of the crediteconomy”, Poovey argues, literary writing provided readers “an imagina-tive relationship to the economic, social and (increasingly) ethical andaesthetic issues raised by Britain’s maturing credit economy” (Poovey

2008: 30); and it served to naturalize the social functions of the moneyeconomy – to the extent that money, in its various forms, has become alargely taken-for-granted tool of exchange

This state of naturalization of the money and credit economy tends

to become de-naturalized in times offinancial crisis, when the capacity

of different monetary genres to represent a certain value loses ibility (Poovey 2008: 6) Situations of financial crisis call attention tothe potential of monetary genres – such as shares, but also simplepaper money – to turn into pure fiction, that is, to lose its capacity ofrepresenting a factual value within a given socio-economic system andsituation Money therefore “constitutes one of the earliest, and mostimportant, forms of representation in relation to which it seemedcrucial to make and reinforce a distinction between fact and fiction”(Poovey 2008: 5) It is for this reason, Poovey argues, that economicand literary theory – both concerned with the “problematic of repre-sentation” – are deeply related

cred-The GFC also constitutes a situation in which the “problematic ofrepresentation” inherent to monetary genres – which nowadays take onfar more diverse and intricate forms than paper money or letters of credit–has become apparent In particular, the so-called U.S subprime mortgagecrisis– the investment bubble, from which the GFC emerged – has shownhow, within a short amount of time, supposed assets and profits can turninto“toxic assets”, losses and ruins The monetary genres used to repre-sent these market values – mortgages, asset backed securities (ABS),collateralized debt obligations (CDO)– turned from supposed representa-tions of“value facts” into fictions, whereas the GFC’s effects on compa-nies, households, cities, economies, nation states and more were anythingbutfictional

Thisfield of tension, between finance, its diverse instruments and thatwhich, in contrast, is often termed reality or the “real economy”, “con-cerned with actually producing goods and services” (Financial TimesLexicon2012), is also crucial to the understanding of urban imaginaries

in GFC portrayals However, in contrast to Poovey’s study of literarygenres that worked to support and mediate the credit economy, thisbook explores literature,film and photography that emerged in an attempt

to narrate and criticizefinance in a situation that exposes the fictional side

of contemporary“monetary genres”

This side is always inherent to the money economy as a system ofexchange, abstraction and value representation The fact that the monetarygenres can turn from representations of fact into fictions is, thus, notproblematic per se, but only becomes problematic under certain condi-tions.“A system of representation is experienced as problematic only when

it ceases to work – that is, when something in the social context callsattention to the deferral or obfuscation of its authenticating ground”(Poovey 2008: 6) However, in the contemporaryfinancial system, it isindeed questionable whetherfinancial instruments ever represent anything

in a non-deferred, non-obfuscating way

InShow me the Money: The Image of Finance, 1700 to the Present, PaulCrosthwaite, Peter Knight and Nicky Marsh suggest that“[t]he failures inthe global financial system that occurred in 2008 were experienced as acrisis because they were confusing and chaotic The causes and implica-tions of the event appeared to be too complex, too impenetrable and toosurprising to be understood” (Crosthwaite et al 2014: 1) One of thereasons why this crisis has so often been described as“too complex to beunderstood” is that finance has significantly changed over the last fourdecades This transformation does not only refer to the instruments andinfrastructures of financial trading, but also to the overall relationshipbetween finance and society This process, which amplified the “proble-matic of representation” inherent to monetary genres, is often referred to

as“financialization” Yet, what does financialization signify, and how canthe concept inform the critical analysis of GFC portrayals?

FINANCIALIZATION

While the origins of the term “financialization” are unclear, it gainedpopularity in the early 1990s (Foster2007), and turned into a catchphraseduring the GFC Yet, in spite of its increasing prevalence in discourses

about global economic development, the concept remains contested –both in terms of definition and utility (see also Aalbers 2015;Christophers2015) In very general terms, scholars agree onfinancializa-tion broadly denoting the“increasing role of finance in the operations ofcapitalism” (Sweezy and Magdoff1972; qtd in Foster2007: 1) Beyondthat, there are attempts within contemporary scholarship to retrace theemergence offinancialization historically.

Economist Giovanni Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century emphasizesthe historically recurrent character offinancialization as a form of financialexpansion and systematic restructuring of the capitalist world economy.For Arrighi,financialization is therefore nothing new, but the “continua-tion of a long-established tendency of historical capitalism towards theformation of ever more powerful blocs of governmental and businessorganizations as leading agencies of capital accumulation on a worldscale” (Arrighi2010 [1994]: 309) While Arrighi’s historical trajectory ishighly influential in financialization scholarship, there is disagreement onthe extent to which contemporary financialization exposes “abnormal”features, setting it apart from earlier patterns offinancial expansion.Randy Martin, Michael Rafferty and Dick Bryan, for example, traceback the distinct contemporary logic of financialization to the Fordistmanner of thinking about production in abstract, structural and compara-tive terms: “[R]ather than decomposing production into door assemblyand wheelfitting (and comparing their performances), finance decomposesassets into their exposures and commensurates their values” (Martin et al

2008: 126) This particular manner of handling assets is facilitated bymeans of financial derivatives whose “central, universal characteristic” is

“their capacity to ‘dismantle’ or ‘unbundle’ any asset into constituentattributes and trade those attributes without trading the asset itself”(Martin et al.2008: 126) The application of derivatives infinancial trad-ing thus produces a form of“meta-trading”, a trading of financial assets’risk exposures It produces a new system of value creation that – to acertain extent– operates independently of its underlying assets

It is this quality of contemporaryfinance that sociologist John BellamyFoster has called an “inverted relation” of finance capital, meaning that

“[t]here is no necessary direct connection between productive investmentand the amassing offinancial assets It is thus possible for the two to be

‘decoupled’ to a considerable degree” (Foster2007: 5) Foster regards this

“possibility of a contradiction between real accumulation and financialspeculation” as “intrinsic to the system [of capitalism] from the start”

(Foster 2007: 5) As the re-emergence of financial investment bubblesthroughout the history of capitalism indicates,financial accumulation has,time and again, uncoupled from productive value creation Rather thanbreaking with this principle,financialization thus constitutes an intensifi-cation of finance capital’s tendency to dissociate from the so-called realeconomy.

Among other factors, this intensification can be ascribed to a tion of the following three interrelated conditions: a stagnation of“real”economic growth since the 1970s – simultaneous to the proliferation ofmultinational corporations; the consequent need for corporations tofindnew assets for capital investment; and the growth of thefinance sector as anew means of capital absorption in response to economic stagnation(Foster2007; Sweezy1997) This analysis corresponds to a Marxian read-ing offinancialization as the effect of what social geographer David Harveyhas termed the “surplus capital absorption problem” (Harvey 2010b).Accordingly, thefinancial sector responds to the basic necessity to reinvestaccumulated capital– intrinsic to the logic of capital reproduction – withthe innovation of new tools of capital investment, such asfinancial secu-rities and derivatives This tendency– supported by deregulatory policies,such as the abolition of the Bretton Woods system of monetary manage-ment in 1971 – ultimately generates enormous amounts of “fictitious”capital, which Harvey has described as “an infinite regression of fictionsbuilt uponfictions” (Harvey2012:10; see alsoChapter 2)

combina-Yet, the question that arises from this rhetoric offictionalization is: if theprocess offinancialization is based on fictions, created within the self-con-tained domain offinancial markets, why does it create perceptible economiccrises, which are not only publicly acknowledged, but also provoke strongcivil and political reactions? The rhetoric of financial abstractness and self-referentiality is at times misleading, because it draws attention away from thestill existing bonds betweenfinance and the real economy

Drawing on an interdisciplinary register offinancialization scholarship,this book refers to financialization to describe, not only, recent transfor-mations in financial innovation, neoliberal policymaking and “fictitious”capital accumulation – but also global developments in everyday socialpractice that are closely linked to these transformations Financialization,thus, also describes the over-spilling of financial market dynamics intodomains of both economic and everyday life that, traditionally, are con-sidered external to thefinancial business Such a perspective, for instance,considers how practices of financial securitization draw upon a socially

widespread everyday culture of private consumption and real estate ment, which– due to factors, such as income repression and unemploy-ment– is largely debt-financed.

invest-In this context, economic geographer Paul Langley – focusing on theU.K and U.S – points out the growing investment of private savings infinancial market products “Through the ownership of shares and contribu-tions to pension plans and mutual funds, the savings of a much greaternumber of individuals and households are now bound-up with the capitalmarkets Many savers have, in short, becomefinancial investors” (Langley

2008: vii) Langley’s analysis emphasizes the joint increase of private ing and borrowing, calling attention to the fact that both tendencies are,first, interrelated and, second, not as private as it seems, but – via financialinstruments, in particular securities– wound up with the global business offinancial trading: “In meeting their obligations, American mortgagors are,for example, often unwittingly ensuring that the wheels of the mortgage-backed securities market continue to turn, a bond market even larger thanthat for US federal government debt” (Langley2008: vii) Today, privateinvesting and borrowing act as major drivers of globalfinancial trading andspeculation Langley calls this the“financialization of everyday life”

invest-Defining the concept of financialization as an analytical perspective,economist Johnna Montgomerie argues thatfinancialization joins analyses

of everyday life and political economy It maps the more subtle tions of financial culture in contemporary society: “how financial marketlogics succeed in reaching down into the minutiae of daily life”, and howeveryday“narratives and performances shape, rather than conform to, thelogics and practices of financialisation” (Montgomerie 2008: 243) Anexample of this is the pervasive use offinancial jargon in everyday language

manifesta-In the volumeIt’s the Political Economy Stupid: The Global Financial Crisis

in Art and Theory, Oliver Ressler and Gregory Sholette polemicize thistendency as“econospeak”:

Even Occupy Wall Street talks about “stakeholders” in its decision-making processes, and refers to “creative factories”, all the while no less symptoma- tically using percentage points to illustrate what is wrong with modern society Which is to say that being in the world now means being worthy

of capitalization And as the language of ultra-deregulated capitalism trates every detail of our lives it has emerged as the default medium of our very self-expression, becoming a kind of toxic mortgage of the soul (Ressler and Sholette 2013 : 10)

pene-While Ressler and Sholette lament the encroachment of entrepreneurialjargon into language, which, like the Orwellian“newspeak”, might ulti-mately preconfigure – if not limit – our ways of thinking, other financia-lization theories call attention to the proliferation of financial mediacoverage (Clark et al.2004) Accordingly,financial market news is increas-ingly provided in different types of media, leading to“finance as entertain-ment” (Clark et al.2004: 289).

This ties in with what Joyce Goggin has described as the blurring oflines “between the supposedly rational technologies of finance, and the

‘less serious’ or ‘irrational’ sphere of culture”, including film, fiction andcomputer games (Goggin2012: 223) Examining, among others, popularand documentary films about finance, the neuro-emotive effects of trad-ing, and financial speculation within Massively Multiplayer Online RolePlaying Games (MMORPGs), Goggin shows how“play is steadily enter-ing into the realm offinance, and finance is becoming ever more ludic”(Goggin2012: 223)

Yet other theories emphasize howfinancialization may be embedded in,while at the same time reinforcing, a broader societal awareness andpsychology of risk Examining what he terms the “assembly of everydayinvestor identities” (Langley2007: 70), Langley argues that the process offinancialization produces “uncertain subjects” who seek to gain futureeconomic security by means of private investment Central to Langley’stheory, which again focuses on the U.K and U.S., is the argument thatuncertainty results from the decline of the welfare state and the concomi-tant demise of collective insurance provision– a situation exacerbated byinvestor acquisition strategies that“advertise” risks to lure individuals intoprivate investment

A similar argument, which situates the crisis within the broader work of neoliberalism, has been made by urban planner Raquel Rolnik,who considers thefinancialization of homeownership a deficient neoliberalresponse to neoliberal economies’ incapacity to provide access to housing

frame-on a broad societal level Accordingly, “the crisis (and its origins in thehousing markets) reflects the inability of market mechanisms to provideadequate and affordable housing for all” (Rolnik2013: 1058)

What these manifold theoretical and analytical perspectives bring intofocus are the socio-economic and cultural dimensions that the“increasingdominance offinance in the operations of capitalism” entail on a broadersocietal level Capturing these different dimensions of contemporaryfinan-cialization scholarship, Manuel Aalbers has defined financialization as “the

increasing dominance offinancial actors, markets, practices, measurementsand narratives, at various scales, resulting in a structural transformation ofeconomies,firms (including financial institutions), states and households”(Aalbers 2015: 214) Using financialization as a framework to explore

“how individuals, firms and the domestic economy are increasinglymediated by new relationships with financial markets” (Montgomerie

2009: 1), this approach also addresses the forms of socio-psychologicalrelations that the process of financialization both strategically harnessesand systematically reproduces

This observation is relevant, because it calls attention to the importance

of not only analyzing GFC portrayals in terms of accuracy, but also interms of framework, structure and emphasis For instance, narratives thatexplain the U.S subprime crisis by focusing on the“growth of the housingbubble” may be accurate regarding the facts and data they provide, butthey may nevertheless fail to register the interrelation between this housingbubble, wage stagnation as a result of both real economic stagnation andrepressive labor policies, culturally produced ideologies of homeownershipand the capitalist imperative to ensure continuous economic growth.Financialization as a perspective that“connects different disciplines butalso different levels of analysis, from the very micro to the very macro”(Aalbers2015: 216)– and, in so doing, interlinks the economic, social,cultural and psychological dimensions of the GFC – informs my subse-quent analysis of urban crisis imaginaries I will argue that these imagin-aries are dissimilar in their capacity to allude to financialization as amultidimensional and systematic perspective on the crisis The concept

of myth will be used to map and conceptualize these differences

MAPPINGMYTH

To develop the concept of myth as a tool for close reading urban GFCimaginaries, this book draws on different elaborations of myth in anthro-pology, semiology, philosophy and communication studies Yet, whilemyth stands out as its main analytical concept– as the lens though whichcrisis narratives will be read– the book actually revolves around three keyconcepts: myth,finance and the city

Denoting constantly evolving sets of socio-material practices, thesethree concepts are inevitably provisional, and their meaning interdependswith a range of related concepts, such as: narrative, aesthetics, neoliberal-ism, globalization, imaginary, abstraction, global city et cetera In the

course of this book, definitions and explanations of these terms will beprovided At the same time, however, I wish to stress that the struggle overthe understanding of these different concepts– which serve to describe andtheorize complex, still evolving phenomena– is at the heart of the dynamic

of mythmaking that this book seeks to explore, conceptualize and critique

To theorizefinance and the challenges it poses in terms of understandingand representation, this book mainly draws on sociological, anthropological,economic and geographical studies offinancial practice and development Inorder to situatefinance within the systemic framework of capitalism, spaceand culture as intersecting fields, the book particularly draws on neo-Marxian analyses, such as David Harvey’s extensive work on neoliberalism,capital flows and globally uneven economic development; FredericJameson’s elaborations of the “cultural dynamics of late capitalism” andthe problems of“representing capital”; as well as Slavoj Žižek’s critique ofcapitalist ideology as reflected in global media and crisis discourses.Complementing the concept of myth as a tool of discourse, narrativeand visual analysis, the book draws on concepts from the interrelatedfields

of cultural, media and literary studies, which currently show a notableinterest in articulations of finance, crisis, and the seemingly “spectral”dynamics of invisible socio-economic and cultural phenomena Examples

of this tendency include Leigh Claire La Berge’s analysis of 1980s financialfiction in Scandals of Abstraction (2015); Oliver Ressler and GregorySholette’s exploration of the GFC in art and theory in It’s the PoliticalEconomy Stupid (2013); Paul Crosthwaite, Peter Knight and NickyMarsh’s historical study of “the image of finance, 1700 to the present”

in Show me the Money (2014); The Journal of Cultural Economy’s specialissues on“financial panics and crisis” (2012),“financial subjects” (2012)and “fictions of finance” (2013); the NECSUS – European Journal ofMedia Studies’ special issues on “crisis” (2012) and“tangibility” (2012);

as well as the so-called “spectral turn” in culture and theory (del PilarBlanco and Peeren,2013,2010; see alsoChapter 6)

Finally, to combine and put into dialogue these various and plinary perspectives, the book uses cultural analysis as self-reflective “con-cept-based methodology” (Bal 2002: 5) Central to this approach is thepractice of close-reading cultural objects through the lens of a specificresearch concept, which cultural analysis deploys in an interdisciplinarymanner – with the aim to put different analytical perspectives into adialogue The implication of this approach is that the concepts applied inthis book– in particular that of myth – are not used in a normative fashion,

interdisci-but in a way that allows my objects of analysis– urban crisis imaginaries –

to“speak back” (Bal2002: 45), that is, to resist, enlighten and shape myconcepts of analysis Thus, even though the next chapter brings togethermyth concepts that will be used for the critical analysis of GFC narratives,

my close reading of these narratives will further define, flesh out andproblematize the concept of myth in its various theoretical and analyticalelaborations

As the book organizes a vast body of different objects of literary andvisual culture under the concept of “narrative”, I wish to clarify that –drawing on Mieke Bal’s Narratology – I use the concept of narrative in

a broader sense, as a particular mode of relating (telling) “a story in

a particular medium, such as language, imagery, sound, buildings, or acombination thereof” (Bal 2009 [1986]: 5) Based on this concept ofnarrative, the book examines entirefilm scenes, but also single film shots,journalistic crisis photography, literary texts – both fictional and non-fictional – and crisis rhetoric in public GFC discourses In so doing, thebook has two major aims The first is to examine and critique recurringimaginaries– urban imaginaries – by means of which contemporary pop-ular cultures frame and iconicize the GFC The second is to explore aparticular practice of crisis narration and communication– the dynamic ofmyth– and identify its specific politics

The narratives analyzed in this book belong to an extensive, mostlyEnglish-speaking popular culture of crisis depiction, whose geographicroots are mainly – though not exclusively – in the U.K and the U.S Inthese narratives, two cities– London and, even more so, New York – tend

to be overrepresented The fact that imaginaries of London and New Yorkdominate crisis narratives is, on the one hand, due to these cities’ status as

“global financial centers” (Sassen 1999), where global financial tions and infrastructures tend to conglomerate, and, on the other hand,due to the fact that both cities already have a particular prominence in theglobal imaginary of literature and film, photography, tourism and urbantheory As myths tend to build on, combine and extend establishedsignifiers, the prominent imaginaries of London and New York offerideal settings for the semiotic operations of myth However, the focus onthese two cities bears the risk of obscuring the preconditions and effectsthat the GFC has in urban and rural places beyond London and New York

institu-To specify and develop the concept of myth as a tool of close readingurban GFC imaginaries, the second chapter of this book introduces dif-ferent concepts of myth from scholars in the fields of anthropology,

semiology, philosophy and communication studies The chapter placesparticular emphasis on Claude Lévi-Strauss’ structural theory and RolandBarthes’ semiotic theory of myth, which will be crucial to the analysis ofurban crisis imaginaries To illustrate how a“mythical reading” opens upproductive ways of understanding popular crisis imaginaries, the chapterexamines a scene from Oliver Stone’s financial crisis film Wall Street: MoneyNever Sleeps (2010).

The following chapters are organized around specific urban imaginariesthat tend to reappear in GFC narratives.Chapter 3explores imaginaries ofurban architecture and public space It situates these motifs within atradition of capitalism critique that revolves around cities and the ways inwhich urban design developed from the modern toward the postmodern.GFC depictions both perpetuate and play on this tradition They narrateand aestheticize modern city geometries, skyscraper shapes, urban panor-ama shots, corporate glass façades and motifs of “present absence” inurban public space In so doing, they project conflicting ideas and percep-tions of finance (such as the idea of market efficiency vs the idea offinancial excess) onto single “mythical” imaginaries

Chapter 4explores how crisis narratives associate imaginaries of urbansubway and limousine transport with financial market dynamics that areproduced by the relatively new mechanisms of digital and derivative trad-ing In particular, the chapter analyzes Oliver Stone’s GFC film WallStreet: Money Never Sleeps (2010), Sebastian Faulk’s crisis novel A Week

in December (2010), and David Cronenberg’s film Cosmopolis (2012),which is based on Don DeLillo’s 2001 novel of the same name Totheorize how digital and derivative trading produce new forms offinancialmarket interaction and temporality, the chapter draws on studies in thefields of financial sociology, anthropology and science and technologystudies It argues that, on the one hand, urban transport imaginariesexpress questions and uncertainties about the particular ontology andphenomenology of financial derivatives, digital trading and its global

“flows” On the other hand, however, these “transport myths” reducethe underlying assets and destructive effects offinancial speculation to thesimplistic trope of sacrificial human bodies Transport imaginaries offinance thus reveal much about the challenges of representing capital inits new digital and speculative forms and mobilities At the same time,however, these myths conceal how – via the mechanisms of debt andsecuritization– finance affects a multiplicity of individual citizens, corpora-tions, cities, states and more

In contrast, the dwelling imaginaries examined inChapter 5hint at thebroader societal effects of the GFC in the U.S context Analyzing, inparticular, Jean Stéphane Bron’s foreclosure crisis film Cleveland contreWall Street (2010) as well as Lauren Greenfield’s documentary The Queen

of Versailles (2012), the chapter demonstrates how imaginaries of urbanand suburban dwelling reflect cultural dynamics that are related to indebt-edness, financial securitization and leveraged investment These imagin-aries tend to focus attention on the concrete effects that the GFC has had

on the aesthetics and utilization of real estate, as well as on the individualattachments that people maintain with their properties and dwelling styles.Dwelling imaginaries have gained popularity in post-crisis popular culture,because they visually manifest socio-cultural conditions– such as immobi-lity and sedentariness– that seem to run counter to the popular rhetoric of

“unrestricted global flows”, which has hitherto dominated globalizationdiscourses They indicate that culturally constructed ideals of real estateownership are central to the contemporary cultures offinancializaton

Chapter 6draws on recent elaborations of the“spectral metaphor” incultural theory in order to explore imaginaries of urban spectrality in GFCnarratives Comparing“black box scenarios” in Marije Meerman’s financedocumentariesMoney and Speed: Inside the Black Box (2011) andThe WallStreet Code (2013) with motifs of urban haunting in journalistic crisisphotographs, the novels Sunset Park (Paul Auster 2010), The Big Short(Michael Lewis 2010),This Bleeding City (Alex Preston 2010), Get MeOut of Here (Henry Sutton 2010),Capital (John Lancaster 2012), andthefilm Margin Call (J.C Chandor 2011), the chapter develops a moregeneral theory on the politics of myth At the center of this theory is theargument that, although all myths form partial expressions of the multi-dimensional process offinancialization, some myths tend to focus atten-tion on partial aspects of this process, whereas others succeed in indicatingtheir own insufficiencies – their “spectral absences” – in articulating finan-cialization While the former type of myth tends to limit itself to one-dimensional interpretations and critiques of the crisis – perpetuating apost-political tendency to avoid systemic critiques of the wider process offinancialization – the latter type of myth opens up more systemic andpolitical readings of the crisis event

The overall argument running through this book is thatfinancializationcan only be experienced in a partial and fragmented manner.Financialization experience therefore leaves multiple “spectral absences”

in terms of comprehension and perceptibility, both in everyday experience

and in its media representations It is impossible to narratefinancialization

in its totality Myth, I argue, is a practice of narrative expression thatdevelops both as a symptom of, and response to, this problem It may bedescribed as a“bridge strategy” of cultural expression, which, instead ofattempting to construct a total image offinancialization, focuses on thevery fragments, contradictions and absences that the experience offinan-cialization poses This provisionality does, however, not prevent mythsfrom having political implications The narrative and aesthetic structures

by means of which myths process the fragments, contradictions andtral absences” of financialization experience determine their respective

“spec-“politics of myth” It is the aim of the following chapters to explorethese structures and politics in the urban imaginaries of popular GFCportrayals

Mythical Crisis Perspectives

What does a financial crisis look like? In Oliver Stone’s crisis film WallStreet: Money Never Sleeps (2010), afinancial crisis resembles the fall from askyscraper Depicting the stock market crash of September 29, 2008, thefilm first shows images of Manhattan’s skyline viewed from the waterfront

In fast motion, clouds pass above the depicted skyline and water streamsalongside the island Providing a contrast to these fast motion shots, thenext frame shows people walking in slow motion on a crowded inner citystreet Dulled traffic noises sound in the background, together with mutedclassical music The next frame focuses on the glass façade of severalskyscrapers viewed from another high position – such as the top of anopposite skyscraper During the next few seconds, the impression created

is that of a fall from the edifice The filmic angle remains focused on theskyscraper façades, but the camera moves down vertically in high speed,accompanied by a sound that is reminiscent of an unfastened rope tackle.The movement is interrupted by quick interludes depicting domino stonesthat collapse in a chain reaction, which fade into close-up shots of a singleskyscraper façade and– subsequently – into shots of a digital market tickerchart Meanwhile, the movement of the camera keeps on imitating anaccelerating fall, rattling down the distinct floors of the skyscraper thateventually blend into the columns of a digital market index chart To picturethe end of the market downfall – the crash – the film shows nothing butblack screen for a few seconds, introduced by the ringing of a stock marketopening bell Immediately afterwards, a faster melody begins, accompanying

© The Author(s) 2017

M Meissner, Narrating the Global Financial Crisis,

Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society,

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-45411-5_2

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afilmic collage of print and TV news media coverage of the crisis, flickeringmarket ticker screens, falling index curves, upset financial professionals,chaos on the trading floor and shots of New York’s financial district,picturing Trinity Church and Wall Street’s charging bull bronze statue.The complex editing of this montage scene indicates how difficult it is

to visually portray financial market dynamics Even a crash, the mostextreme market development, is hard to visualize, which is why the filmWall Street: Money Never Sleeps employs an abundance of metaphors andsymbols – such as the fall from a skyscraper, or the domino effect – anddisplaysfinancial news media coverage to indicate that a market crash ishappening at this moment of thefilmic plot However, the articulation offinancial market dynamics does not only challenge the filmic genre Verbaldescriptions offinance appear infeasible without the employment of meta-phor and abstract market jargon Terms such as“bubble” or “downfall” aswell as references to the most significant global market indexes can befound in almost everyfinancial crisis report, whether journalistic, encyclo-pedic or academic Nevertheless, various different attempts to portrayfinancial market dynamics have been made throughout the history offinancial capitalism, exploiting the narrative potential of diverse mediasuch as film, literature and photography This is particularly true withregard to the GFC, which has provoked a flood of multimedia crisisnarratives ranging fromfilms to novels to hypertextual crisis timelines.Many of these narratives have been criticized for obscuring the con-crete mechanisms of financialization – a critique which is of particularrelevance considering that future directions in economic and regulatorypolicymaking depend on present-day means of describing and assessingthe financial system, and of communicating potential critiques to abroader public Critiquing the rhetoric of excess that pervadesfinancialcrisis discourses, political scientist Marieke de Goede has argued that“[a]complex reality like financial crisis has no unequivocal and immediatemeaning, but depends upon political and cultural processes of articula-tion, mediation, and sedimentation to be able to lead to enactment ofregulatory change” (De Goede2009: 296) De Goede contends that, byoverstating excess, irrationality and madness, crisis discourses tend toobscure systemic reasons of the GFC – such as the interdependencybetween subprime lending and financial securitization that led up tothe 2008 subprime bubble Suggesting that the GFC resulted fromsupposedly “abnormal” behaviors such as reckless borrowing or the

“irrational exuberance” of greedy bankers, crisis discourses therefore

often leave thefinancial system as such, including its “contestable cial speculative practices”, intact (De Goede2009: 301).

finan-In a 2011 survey on fictional, documentary and avant-garde financialcrisis films, Jeff Kinkle and Alberto Toscano express a similar critiquetoward crisis cinema In particular, they criticizefilmmakers for failing todepict economic turmoil without “reverting to longstanding and ulti-mately comforting tropes: families reuniting to overcome hardship, themachismo and malevolence of stockbrokers, the corrosive power of greed”(Kinkle and Toscano2011: 39) Kinkle and Toscano concede that mani-festations of the GFC often occurred as negative events– as “business nottaking place” (Kinkle and Toscano2011: 40)– which pose a challenge interms of narrativization Yet, despite this challenge, economic crises havenotable impacts on“everyday life and the symbols of wealth and power”(ibid) Therefore,“[r]epresentations of crisis need not be crises of repre-sentation” (Kinkle and Toscano2011: 39)

De Goede’s as well as Kinkle and Toscano’s arguments both call for acritical inquiry into contemporary crisis narratives To that end, this chap-ter develops the concept of myth as an analytical framework of narrativeanalysis and critique It introduces different elaborations of myth inanthropology, semiology, philosophy and communication studies toshow that the concept has a tradition of being associated with situations

of indeterminacy and crisis, and of being employed in the context of urbantheory and capitalism critique Drawing on these theories, I argue that aninterdisciplinary use of the myth concept can facilitate a particularlynuanced close reading of contemporary crisis narratives and urban crisisimaginaries My central argument will be that myth – as the conceptualhistory of the term will show – constitutes a particular type of narrativeexpression, a strategy of thought and a form of ideological communicationthat is prone to accrue from situations of uncertainty and indeterminacy.Paradoxically, myths represent allusive yet condense forms of expression,critique and iconicization that may conceal, yet at the same time, illumi-nate their respective topic Myth as an ambivalent cultural practice thusrequires a multilayered analysis that focuses not only on content and style,but also on the structural composition, cultural connotations and on thepolitical implications of the mythical narrative

Understood that way, the concept of myth opens up new possiblereadings of contemporary crisis portrayals, revealing how crisis depictionsare linked to contemporary anxieties, controversies and confusions aboutthefinancial economy, globalization, digitization, large-scale indebtedness

and other GFC-related intricacies Importantly, the use of myth as tical concept can also yield insights into uncertainties regarding the logic,the instruments and the future of financialized capitalism, and it canidentify key contradictions that mark the communication of finance to abroader public These contradictions, for example, concern the ambivalentrole that the ideal of market efficiency plays in finance discourses, theindeterminacy of thefinancial industry’s physical location within a globalnetwork of digital transactions, and the unclear relation thatfinance main-tains with what is commonly referred to as the so-called“real economy”.Myth, as core theories of the concept suggest, does not solve these incon-sistencies, but rather objectifies, re-articulates and reiterates them narra-tively Drawing on recent revisions of the concept of myth incommunication studies and political philosophy (such as Mosco 2004;Bottici 2007), I will therefore argue that myths develop as immediateresponses to a crisis that challenges prevailing models of understanding,perceiving and representing capitalism in its contemporary“financialized”form.

analy-MYTH ANDECONOMICS

“How could all of this happen?” was a key question raised in publicdiscourses about the GFC from 2008 onwards Economists were blamedfor not having foreseen the risk of the “credit crunch” Politicians wereasked to justify why neoliberal market deregulation had been dominatingeconomic policymaking in Europe and the U.S for about four decadesprior to the crisis Both experts and the general public were looking fornarratives to illuminate this crisis event, whose extensive causes and con-sequences could not be fully sounded out Amongst these explicatorynarratives, the term “myth” and concepts related to the notion of mythhave been frequent In fact, publications such as Justin Fox’s The Myth ofthe Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward and Delusion on WallStreet (2009), Bernard E Harcourt’s The Illusion of Free Markets:Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order (2011) and Joseph Heath’sEconomics Without Illusions: Debunking the Myths of Modern Capitalism(2010) actually use the word“myth” to criticize economic paradigms thatsupposedly prepared the GFC In all three examples, the term “myth”refers to a false belief, or an errant mindset

Although I will refer to the concept of myth in a different sense, thesetitles exemplify that economics form a highly contestedfield of scientific

expertise, relying largely on narrative truths The allegedly“systemic” nature

of markets cannot be substantiated without taking recourse to “stories”interrelating the distinct actors and influencing factors that supposedlydetermine market developments Economic historian Deidre McCloskeyhas therefore claimed that“economics is saturated with narration”, which

is why“storytelling offers a richer model of how economists talk and a moreplausible story of their disagreements” (McCloskey 1990: 10) This alsosuggests that there is a relationship between economics and myth as parti-cular type of narrative expression– the more so since economic theory workswith metaphors that are strongly reminiscent of mythological figures,amongst these, Adam Smith’s model of the “invisible hand”

Literary theorist Joseph Vogl interprets this tendency to allegorizeeconomic forces and principles (“invisible hand”, “black swan”, “blackbox”) as an attempt to understand dynamics that, in their totality, appear

to act not only unintelligibly, but also autonomously – detached frommarket actors’ individual behavior According to Vogl, deregulated mar-kets challenge economic theory and perception because, especially in times

of globalization, the total sum of market determinants and developmentscannot be empirically comprehended In a way, markets thus outgrowtheir human creators, while economists are left with the task of having tospot a market-underlying logic For Vogl, the insight that capitalist eco-nomics depend on allegorical models to pretend coherence within thechaos of markets uncovers a parallel between economics and religion Inthis sense, Vogl’s theory ties in with Walter Benjamin’s interpretation ofcapitalism as a religious cult in the fragment “Capitalism as Religion”(Benjamin1996 [1921]) For Benjamin, capitalism as a“cult” hinges onthe belief of key principles, institutions and objects, of which the mostessential is money as a means of general signification and exchange.Vogl’s critique of economics equally highlights the importance of quasi-religious faith in economic principles– in particular the supposed efficiency

of liberal markets In this context, Vogl coins the concept of“oikodicy”(oikodizee), which, echoing the field of theodicy in theology, describeseconomists’ explanations for why a system that is allegedly directedtowards rational self-regulation produces enormous irregularities,fluctua-tions and losses Vogl thus replaces the theodicy question of why anomnipotent, good god allows for worldly evil with the“oikodical” ques-tion of why efficient markets produce crises As a discipline of realityinterpretation, economics accordingly creates compensatory models –myths– whose function it is to reconcile theory with reality

Strikingly, all of the aforementioned critical perspectives on neoliberaleconomics and capitalist culture make use of the term “myth” and/ormyth-related concepts such as narrative, metaphor, cult, faith and belief.Most of these theories focus, in particular, onfinance and financial crises.However, what these different perspectives equally show is that the notion

of myth is ambiguous While some theories the use the term “myth” todebunk a thesis, assumption or way of thinking, others use the mythconcept in a much more far-reaching sense– alluding to semiotics, cogni-tion, religion and ideology It is therefore crucial to have a closer look atthe relation between myth concepts and the notion of crisis

MYTH ANDCRISIS

While the“everyday use of the words ‘myth’ and ‘mystification’ implies afalsification of reality – a fictionalization of truth for the benefit of anenchanting narrative” (Meissner2012: 99)– more profound understand-ings of myth have been developed in anthropology, philosophy, linguistics,literary and political theory, psychology, sociology and religious studies.Scholars, such as Roland Barthes, Hans Blumberg, Joseph Campbell,Ernst Cassirer, Sigmund Freud, Carl Gustav Jung and Claude Lévi-Strauss stand out among the most prominent theorists of myth, havinginspired critical reexaminations of the role of myth in culture It is thusimportant to note that the concept of myth has been travelling throughdifferent disciplines and adopting various guises whose theoretical implica-tions are often conflicting The aim of this chapter is not to approve, ordisapprove, of any particular theory of myth, but rather to pick, developand apply concepts of myth that can be productive for the analysis of GFCportrayals The idea behind this approach is to use the concept of myth as atool of critical analysis

In his survey of myth theories, Robert Segal points out that myth has, asyet, constituted a conceptual approach rather than a concrete object (Segal

2004: 2) In the humanities and social sciences, the concept enables criticalinsights into different objects of interest, such as the human psyche orideology Nonetheless, similarfields of tension have been determining theconcept of myth across different disciplines First of all, myth is often

defined in relation to reason In the ancient Greek context, the relationshipbetween mythos and logos wasfirst one of synonymy (Bottici 2007: 10),then one of opposition (Coupe 1997: 6) Mythos – originally meaning

“word” or “speech” – was used to refer to a type of speech inferior to logos

This contextual employment of the word mythos in relation to logosresulted in an antagonism between both concepts (Coupe 1997, 6).Mythos started to designate a type of speech that defies logos, and theother way around Today, this conceptual tension between myth andreason persists, though the concrete“settings” within this field of tensionhave been rethought multiple times.

A radical revision of the conceptual opposition between myth andreason, inter alia, occurred in critical theory, notably in TheodorAdorno’s and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1988[1946]), which reads:

Myths which fell victim to the Enlightenment were themselves its products The scienti fic calculation of events annuls the account of them which thought had once given in myths Myths thought to report, to name, to tell of origins – but therefore also to narrate, record, explain From a record, they [myths] soon became a teaching The principle of imma- nence, the explanation of every event as repetition, which enlightenment upholds against mythical imagination, is that of myth itself (Adorno and Horkheimer 1988 [1946] : 5 and 8)

For Adorno and Horkheimer, both myth and reason result from thetendency to distance from the world and project on it human ideas ofclassification Enlightenment – the alleged project of reason – is thus notopposed to mythology, but rather exaggerates and totalizes the mytholo-gical scheme of“domesticating” the world by structuring it according tospecific principles of thought and imagination In that view, enlightenmentcan be understood as a radical outgrowth of mythology

A further relation that accrues from the conceptual tension between mythand reason is the tension between myth and science Positivism, producingscientific results from empirical evidence, has been defined in opposition tomyth and vice versa Modern science wasfirst believed to offer a replacement

of myth until, in the twentieth century, various disciplines started to refutethe death of myth and reaffirmed its prevalence in modernity (Segal2004: 3).While psychology devised the concept of myth in response to the idea of

an unconscious – myth thus forming an expression of individual conflicts,fears, neuroses or psychological archetypes– philosophy, anthropology, lin-guistics and literary studies developed broader societal conceptualizations

of myth These theories are marked by two main lines of thought: On theone hand, myth is understood as a way of dealing with worldly challenges,

inconsistencies and conflicts On the other hand, it is understood as a type ofarticulation and ideological expression Both lines of thought are relevantfor the analysis of GFC discourses.

For philosopher Ernst Cassirer, the “modern political myth” resultsfrom an unfortunate turn in history towards a“new technique of myth”(Cassirer 1946: 282), alienating myth from its former cultural functionand exploiting it propagandistically According to Cassirer, the formerfunction of myth was to give symbolic expression to human emotions.Myth constitutes an“art of expressing hope and fear” (Cassirer1946: 48).Considering portrayals of the GFC, this conceptualization of myth isproductive because it emphasizes the connection between myth and crisis.Cassirer describes myth as an“objectification of man’s [sic] social experi-ence” that allows for a “metamorphosis of fear” by providing a means ofcondensed emotional expression (Cassirer1946: 47) The origin of myth

is thus bound to the notion of crisis, understood as a state of insecurity,indeterminacy and fear In situations of crisis, myth constitutes a strategy

“to come to terms with reality, to live in an ordered universe, and toovercome the chaotic state in which things and thoughts have not yetassumed a definite shape and structure” (Cassirer1946: 15)

As Cassirer’s theory emphasizes the structuring capacities of myth, histake on the concept is close– yet not equal – to Lévi-Strauss’ structuralistunderstanding of myth In contrast to Cassirer, Lévi-Strauss’ theory ofmyth does not start from the notion of chaos, but from the assertion thatthe world bears irreconcilable contradictions For Lévi-Strauss, myth con-stitutes a complex cultural strategy of dealing with such inconsistencies.His concept of myth focuses on the intrinsic structural qualities of themythical narrative itself Pointing to the sophisticated forms and styles ofmythical narratives, Lévi-Strauss emphasizes that the function of a mythcan consist of neither expression nor explanation alone (Lévi-Strauss1955:

428–429) Instead, attention has to be diverted to the structural tion of a myth’s content: “If there is a meaning to be found in mythology,this cannot reside in the isolated elements which enter into the composi-tion of a myth, but only in the way those elements are combined” (Lévi-Strauss1955: 431)

composi-To prove this point, he provides an exemplary analysis of the Oedipusmyth by subdividing the mythological narrative into elements that holdsimilar and opposite implications as regards their affirmation/dismissal ofblood relations Consequently, the myth appears as a pattern of opposedsymbolic pairs, which Lévi-Strauss interprets as the expressions of a conflict

between the cosmological belief that mankind is autochthonous and theempirical reality of reproduction and childbirth According to Lévi-Strauss, the Oedipus myth does not resolve this inconsistency betweentheory and experience, but instead restages it symbolically– via the mythi-cal narrative Myth replaces a worldly contradiction with a narrative contra-diction that is more bearable It acts as a sophisticated form of projection,whose function in culture consists of its soothing effect Myth“tempersthe oppositions that it expresses” (Segal 2004: 30) or– in Lévi-Strauss’own words– “myth grows spiral-wise until the intellectual impulse whichhas originated it is exhausted” (Lévi-Strauss1955: 443).

To interpret the Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps market crash sceneusing Lévi-Strauss’ approach to mythical narratives would involve a struc-tural analysis of the scene that divides thefilmic succession of shots intosymbolic pairs of opposition such as, for instance, stability and fall, insideand outside, reality and news media coverage Building on this structuralanalysis, an interpretation of key conflicts and inconsistencies characteriz-ing the public perception and understanding of the GFC could follow Forinstance, the fact that the fall is symbolized as something physical– as a fallfrom a skyscraper– but that this symbolism eventually imitates a mediatedreality– the fall of financial index curves – is crucial to the analysis of thescene Moreover, the visual confrontation and blending of crisis news (innewspapers, on TV, on market ticker screens) with the immediate reality ofWall Street’s urban space (on the trading floor, in Manhattan’s financialdistrict) indicate that the imaginary of Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps’market crash scenefiguratively reproduces a tension between reality and itsrepresentation on the market crash day of September 29, 2008

In this vein, the scene articulates the challenge of thinking and locatingwhat is commonly referred to as“market reality” False market rumors caneasily cause the fall of a stock, and thus turn into a market reality Financialmarket reality resembles philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s notion of a “hyper-reality”, a simulated reality that is “more real than real” (Baudrillard1994:81) Similarly, political events and decisions can provoke pricefluctuations

in financial markets, triggered by collective estimations of the marketeffects that these respective political events might provoke in the future.This future orientation offinancial markets reinforces the impression thatfinancial market reality is a form of virtual reality in which the futureprojects itself into the present and appears via the mediated sphere ofmarket tickers and news coverage Ultimately, afinancial market reality –such as the fall of a stock– of course has more tangible, unmediated effects

Yet, these effects mostly take place in the relative future, when losses result

in corporate downsizings and other“real” economic effects

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps’ market crash scene alludes to thisproblem of market tangibility – to uncertainties and inconsistencies reg-arding the location, causality and temporality offinancial market reality –

by contrasting exterior shots of Manhattan’s financial district with shotsfrom its inside, and by creating constant shifts and transitions betweeneveryday public space in New York and the crisis situation as it unfolds inthefinancial news media In relation to the urban realm – its architectureand its public space – inconsistencies in the early GFC experience ofSeptember 2008 are symbolically rearticulated This employment of theurban imaginary corresponds to Lévi-Strauss’ structural definition of myth.The urban imaginary thus has a“mythical function”

An obvious parallel between Lévi-Strauss’ and Cassirer’s concepts ofmyth consists in the fact that, for both theorists, the origin of myth is akin

to the notion of crisis, whether understood as an unsettling chaos(Cassirer) or an irresolvable contradiction (Lévi-Strauss) Beyond that,both highlight the relation between myth and language Yet, whileCassirer devises myth as the origin of language– as the symbolic objecti-fication of a social experience – Lévi-Strauss views myth as a form of meta-language Due to its structural qualities – the fact that it contains mean-ingfully interacting pairs of opposition– myth becomes a language of itsown Another aspect uniting Cassirer’s and Lévi-Strauss’ theories is thatboth assign a socio-cultural function to the phenomenon of myth Forboth, myth originates from a particularly challenging situation and repre-sents a narrative strategy of coping with a conflict This conflict, it appears,

is a cognitive conflict Similar to logos, myth acts as a technique ofthought It is therefore crucial to consider in what ways today’s financialsystem, in general,– and the GFC in, particular, – pose challenges in terms

of understanding and ideology

MYTH AND FINANCE

Mimicking Karl Marx’s and Friedrich Engels’s Manifesto of the CommunistParty (1848), a 2011 article in the news magazineDER SPIEGEL reads:

A specter is haunting Europe, it ’s the specter of the markets It swallows up millions, it dumps governments, it produces disputes on summits [The markets], which were celebrated for ages as a self-regulating magical device,

producing wealth – and as an expression of collective reason – stand there as

an uncanny threat The peoples stare at them full of anxiety and doubt, full

of questions, which governments – perplexed as they are – cannot answer anymore (Buse et al 2011 : 40; my translation)

Referring to magic and the specterfigure, the article brings into focus that,for the majority of the world’s population – including political decisionmakers– financial market practices and dynamics constitute largely opaquephenomena The article proceeds by asking questions such as:“How can it

be that a single financial market is ten times as big as the economicperformance of the entire world?”; “Are politicians’ accusations true,claiming that markets are willfully speculating on Europe?” and “Whogoverns money?” (Buse et al.2011: 42)

The list of questions could be complemented ad infinitum The GFChas rendered it obvious how little is actually known about the actors,functionality and eventual power of globalfinancial markets In addition,

a profound insecurity about the actual location of financial tradingpersists Markets supposedly defy material space, operating by means ofglobal“data flows” “Global” and “digital” therefore form catchphrases ofGFC discourses Yet, despite the ostensibly globalized framework of con-temporaryfinance, nation states and their policies remain relevant in crisisdebates, miming a potential counterweight tofinancial markets’ allegedly

“free-floating” global power This confrontation between finance andpublic policy, as well as the attempt to physically localizefinance, is equally

reflected in the ways certain cities recur in crisis discourses On the onehand, so-called“financial capitals”, such as New York and London – butalso Chicago, Frankfort and Paris – are mentioned as the physical siteswhere thefinancial markets’ head institutions are located On the otherhand, political capitals, such as Brussels and Washington, which, in somecases, are congruent with the financial world’s capitals (for instanceLondon and Paris), recur as the actual places where bailouts, bad banks,austerity measures and other kinds of crisis policies are resolved

However, confusion exists not only about the actors and locations ofthe crisis, but also with regard to its temporality Vogl conceptualizes theGFC as a specter indicating that“time has become out of joint” EchoingJacques Derrida’s reading of the ghost figure in William Shakespeare’sHamlet (Derrida2006), Vogl refers to the“multitemporal” workings offinancial speculation Financial crises, he argues, reveal a mismatch ofexpectations related to different times They uncover that the speculative

capital obligations of the present do not correspond to the future state ofvalue distribution on the markets The bursting of an investment bubbletherefore exposes a disjuncture of temporalities, making it obvious that thefuture performances of certain assets do not live up to the collectiveanticipations of their investors These anticipations, on the other hand,are mostly inspired by past experiences, informing trading decisions andautomated trading algorithms In order to make immediate profits, today’sfinancial system thus exploits experiences of the past and anticipations ofthe future, whereby an actual crisis offinance epitomizes a miscalculationbetween these different temporalities.

Contemporary finance interweaves multiple temporal dimensions Itintertwines past experiences with future risks Both happen in the present,and often at enormous velocities Crisis discourses therefore often empha-size speed and mass reaction, referring to “milliseconds” and “dominoeffects” Yet, Vogl’s employment of the spectral metaphor just as wellallegorizes how difficult it is to perceive and apprehend financial trading

in general To conceive of present-dayfinance is challenging because, even

if its concrete instruments (bonds, asset backed securities, credit defaultswaps, etc.) were broadly familiar, the totality offinancial market develop-ments, based on the use of such instruments, could not be overviewed.Otherwise, speculation would not make sense

Contemporaryfinance thus has opacity as a precondition If all investorshad detailed and complete knowledge of all market products and devel-opments, the idea of speculation – of taking market bets against eachother – would become obsolete Indeed, financial indexes supposedlyrecord and summarize global market developments In addition, marketactors have tools of market analysis at their disposal These tools, however,can only give an indirect overview of market values and interactions, which

is based on mathematic abstraction

Beyond that, the concrete modality of value creation on the globalfinancial markets poses problems of comprehension These problems arenotably due to the very functionality of thefinancial economy in contrast

to the common, yet contested, notion of the so-called “real economy”.According to the Financial Times Lexicon, the term “real economy”describes“the part of the economy that is concerned with actually produ-cing goods and services, as opposed to the part of the economy that isconcerned with buying and selling on thefinancial markets” However, ifthe financial economy is not “real” in the sense that it does not producevalue, it is challenging to understand why the transaction volume realized

on thefinancial markets allegedly exceeds that of the real economy mously (Buse et al.2011; Harvey2010b: 99) This raises the question ofhow and what values are actually produced in thefinancial business?Different analyses, based on divergent economic ideologies, provideconflicting answers to this question According to a Marxian understand-ing of capitalism,financialization constitutes a process of fictitious capitalaccumulation Marxian social geographer David Harvey explains this idea

enor-as follows:

Fictitious capital, for Marx, is a fetish construct which means, that it is real enough but that it is a surface phenomenon that disguises something important about underlying social relations When the bank lends to a consumer to buy a house and receives a flow of interest in return, it makes it seem as if something is going on in the house that is directly producing value when that is not the case When banks lend to other banks or when the Central Bank lends to the commercial banks who lend to land speculators looking to appropriate rents, then fictitious capital looks more and more like

an in finite regression of fictions built upon fictions These are all examples of fictitious capital flows (Harvey 2012 : 39 –40)

Fictitious capital isfictitious in that it is based on the expectation of a futureyield return It only comes to represent a “real” value if it ultimatelycorrelates with the creation of value through real production (real capital).Uncoupled from any real-economic correlate – from value produced bylabor– fictitious capital remains a fiction Therefore, capital on the finan-cial markets is “real enough” but a “surface phenomenon” As a “fetishconstruct”, it has an attributed value, which it eventually might not live up

to, as in the case of the U.S subprime mortgage crisis

As Harvey goes on to argue, contemporaryfinance is designed to obscurethe relationships betweenfictitious capital and its underlying assets of invest-ment Practices of securitization, for example, enable market actors tobundle up and spread the risk of multiple loans issued amongst multipleinvestors, thereby concealing the respective risks of each individual loan Inaddition, investment risks can be insured using complex derivative instru-ments, such as credit default swaps (CDS), which can just as well be used forthe sake of speculation More generally speaking, this means that thefundamental correlation betweenfictitious and real value creation becomesincreasingly blurred, while, at the same time, the amount offictitious capital

on the globalfinancial markets tends to accumulate